Human Variation

1.  When the human body experiences episodes of extreme cold, things can get very quickly dangerous.  The human body regulates temperature at an ideal 98.6 degrees fahrenheit, plus or minus one degree depending on the person.  Whenever this temperature drops below 94 degrees the body will begin to experience hypothermia, which can quickly lead to death.

2.  Obviously many people do live in these extremely cold climates and therefore have needed to adapt in various ways.  A short term adaptation to the cold weather is for the body's muscles to shiver therefore producing a little extra heat.  A facultative adaptation is the increase of fat in and around the torso's vital organs in order to better insulate.  A developmental adaptation to the extreme cold is the tendency for populations in these areas to have short compact bodies to help keep in body heat.  Lastly, a cultural adaptation is the practice of families to sleep in compact groups side by side to reduce the amount of heat lost during the night.  

3.  The benefit of studying human adaptation across clines helps us realize that race is just a fabricated way of classifying people.  This information can be helpful to us by showing that race is merely the specific adaptations of the human in very different environments.  These specific adaptations over time have created  phenotypic differences to help them survive.  

4.  Similar to the last question, I can now see race as basically just a human variation and nothing more than that.  Sure we have our own separate cultures and practices but we are the same human as everyone else.  Race is just a way to classify a certain look of humans which is fine, but nothing should come of that classification.